Going Nowhere? the Politics of Remembering (And Forgetting) Molly Ringwald CHRISTINA LEE
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going nowhere? the Politics of Remembering (and Forgetting) Molly Ringwald CHRISTINA LEE Don’t you forget about me Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t.1 Simple Minds Each generation is remembered via seminal icons seen to embody the ‘essence’ of an era, with youth culture contributing an impressive catalogue of key personalities. The canonised likes of James Dean, Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando continue to be memorialised and shrouded in a cloak of mystery, romantic tragedy and myth; with books, movies and television programs functioning as a type of prolonged eulogy to the dead and buried. While they have entered history as notable figures, this paper takes as its subject American film actor and youth icon Molly Ringwald who is of the present but remains firmly, and problematically, entrenched in the past. Under the auspices of filmmaker John Hughes, Ringwald would be hailed as the quintessential teen queen in the mid-1980s. By the time her face graced the front page of a 1986 edition of Time magazine, she was already a household name for a market that crowned her the ‘model modern teen’ and the poster child for teenage angst.2 During her three year reign at the multiplex, the Molly Ringwald phenomenon instigated a media feeding frenzy and spilled onto the streets with devoted fans, the Ringlets, imitating Ringwald’s punk-flapper fashion and flaming mop top. Ringwald’s fame began to descend into obscurity in the late 1980s which coincided with her attempt at breaking into what many considered more adult roles. While it may appear a case of yet another child actor’s unsuccessful transition to adulthood—their novelty and endearing cuteness having worn thin—Ringwald continues to be prolific in film, television and stage productions and has achieved considerable CHRISTINA LEE—GOING NOWHERE? 89 acclaim; even appearing in Jean Luc-Godard’s 1987 film adaptation of King Lear. However, there remains the incessant need to situate the actor in a 1980s time capsule. I argue that this nostalgic fixation with Ringwald as the eternal youth and association with the decade is symptomatic of contemporary preoccupations and anxieties in which the past is understood ‘not as a given “thing” which we must preserve, but as a force constantly resonating in the present, producing new layers of sound and meaning’.3 Where is Molly Ringwald now? And does anyone really care? The fear of being forgotten is perhaps matched only by the paralysing anxiety of being trapped in the past and unable to escape. As an ideological compression of events, it is history at its most efficient and ruthless. History positions the temporal and spatial into orderly com- partments where it ‘clarifies, tidies, and elucidates’.4 What is inevitably lost in this lockdown is the fundamental basis of time, that is, the intensity of the ephemeral. As history handles excess awkwardly, it often replaces the liminality and emotive gravity of an experience with measurable facts and figures, especially those that do not fall into the category of official history. In its fixed state, authorised narratives occupy the centre while marginalised narratives are ignored or pushed so far to the edges that they disappear altogether. In studying the cultural body of Ringwald—a figure who is regularly exhumed from a nostalgic necropolis in popular remembrances—the broader scope of the paper extends beyond a case study of a particular screen icon to broach the politics of memory and history in the context of youth cinema, and the role of film in facilitating the restoration of what history has omitted. — Exhuming the past and historical in(ter)vention Zygmunt Bauman states, ‘Identity sprouts on the graveyard of communities, but flourishes thanks to the promise of the resurrection of the dead’.5 This resurrection conjures up the ghosts of that which reiterate and reinstate dominant histories. The social relevance bestowed upon an event, a period, a people, becomes incumbent upon its ability to be defined via the tangible artefacts and verifiable information encased in books, museum exhibits, documents and the records from authority figures and dignitaries—an archival history if you will. The result is an often static and petrified narrative permanently etched in relics and monuments, stored in dusty vaults where the clock has stopped. Problematically, this creates ‘refugees, displaced persons, men and women without a country, cast out of time, the living dead’ whose experiences are erased the very moment they are surpassed by the chronometer of modernity.6 By relegating their subsistence to the domains of myth, heresy, rumour, fiction and folklore, this leaves little or no vestige of their existence. One need only turn to political demonstrations, such as co-ordinated protests against the Iraq war and refugee detention centres, to witness the privileging of sanctioned government and media reports, even when factually incorrect, over public opinion and even the experiences of those involved in the 90 VOLUME13 NUMBER1 MAR2007 actual event. The inability to anchor an identity to a validated past writes out disempowered groups from their own histories, perpetuating their dislocation from the social memoryscape. Alternative and oppositional narratives and ideologies are to be found in other forms such as oral history, and in popular or mass mediums.7 These modes expand the possibilities of (re)thinking about the past, and contribute to a collective process that can be described as the ‘social production of memory’ where everyone is a potential historian.8 Cinema provides one such implement for recording (and later recalling) events that may otherwise be ignored. Considering the visual and aural spectacle of youth culture, it is of little surprise that cinema has become integral in providing a kind of unofficial documentation of the youth experience with its ability to capture sight, sound and movement. More importantly, it is the affective threads in cinema—its ability to respark certain corporeal responses—that reconnects the past to the present tense and creates not only meaning, but furthermore a sense of meaning- fulness. The diegesis of film bestows youth a time and space which can be named and claimed as their own by performing the roles of subordination, dominance and struggle that speaks in the literacy of the disempowered. As Patrick Wright asserts, it is the periphery ‘where the disorders of the centre are most manifest and … where the future must be found’.9 Here, the stories of the unpopular players in a history not of their own making become salient and purposeful. When a fashion, the graffiti on a wall, the local street-corner hangout or the parochial colloquialism associated with a fad means more than the contents of a published register of events and invokes a collective consciousness, then the rules of coercive interplay between history and identity begin to buckle under the weight of memories liberated from the past. Too often has history been equated solely with a complete, and inert past and unquestioned truth. Time is tidily categorised as past, present and future in dominant historiography; separate checkpoints on a disconnected overpass. History creates the illusion of objectivity, stability and distance that maps a ‘symbolically serviceable past’ that allows us to derive an explanation of where we are now, the final destination, in a linear and naturally unfolding narrative.10 The paradox is ‘that the proper object of history is not the past but the past–present relationship’.11 The interstices between past–present become an ambiguous space where memory and nostalgia hover, regarded as an offence to the empirical logic of archival records with its exactitude of dates, key figures and locations of importance. As argued by Andreas Huyssen, however, it is precisely this fissure in time that makes memory powerfully alive and critical in our understandings of the past.12 The image banks of bygone days do not function as storage systems or passive receptacles, but rather partake in the dynamic, reciprocal shaping of current times.13 Popular memory is one means of investing the past in the present. It retrieves throwaway slivers from what Greil Marcus describes as ‘the dustbin of history’, that is, alternative stories, CHRISTINA LEE—GOING NOWHERE? 91 flows of time and space which elucidate the struggles and paradoxes that shape social organ- isation and knowledge, and challenge the notion of a monopolistic, singular remembering.14 The bridging of gaps reinserts those made ‘invisible, silent, or despised’ by modernity into the landscape of the Now, thus providing the opportunity to revise, rewrite and reinterpret previously untouchable truths of societal antiquity generated by (oftentimes nationalist) myth.15 Popular memory is both an object of study and a political practice.16 It enables the disenfranchised to negotiate an identity from their fragmented and fractured subjectivities and to intervene in historical narrative.17 Svetlana Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia is worthwhile considering here as an adjunct to popular memory. Boym contends that while restorative nostalgia evokes national narratives through a return to origins and intentional monuments which attempt to recuperate a sense of historical truth, reflective nostalgia is more concerned with the ‘mediation on history and passage of time’ and the ‘imperfect process of remembrance’.18 If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and home- land in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from comparison, judgment or critical reflection.19 Popular memory and reflective nostalgia wedge the past into the discursive and ideologi- cal framework of the present in which remembering becomes political.